,
After days of fierce fighting, Chad's army and rebels hostile to President Idriss Deby Itno made preparations on opposite sides of the Sudanese border for the next battle.
Deby himself, surrounded by his generals, was commanding the army reinforcements and deployments from a headquarters set up in Adre, a town near the border with Sudan's strife-torn Darfur province.
Troops were arriving from the direction of Abeche, the main town in eastern Chad, and its airport, 150 kilometres (95 miles) to the west, AFP journalists said.
A few dozen kilometres away, the rebel Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD), led by General Mahamat Nouri, a renegade defence minister, was getting ready inside Sudan for what a spokesman said would be a “decisive battle.”
The rival sides have issued contradictory casualty reports and claims of victory since heavy fighting began Saturday around the town of Biltine, but it was clear that the army subsequently launched an offensive against two rebel coalitions that began attacks late in October.
On Monday, the Rally of Democratic Forces (RAFD) led by two nephews of Deby, the twin brothers Tom and Timame Erdimi, for the first time fought alongside the UFDD when government troops attacked positions of both rebel movements around the border town of Hadjer Marfain.
“Government forces on Tuesday attacked our forces in two columns,” UFDD vice president Acheikh Ibn Oumar told AFP on Thursday, adding that one column “pushed right up to our headquarters about a dozen kilometres (seven miles) inside Sudan.”
With the other offensive at Am Zoer in Chad, “these attacks have forced us to regroup our forces to defend our headquarters, which we have done,” Ibn Oumar said, reached by satellite telephone.
“This morning, the forces of President Deby have pulled back, but he is regrouping his troops on the border,” the rebel leader said. “He is determined to eliminate us. The next battle will be decisive.”
Chad's Defence Minister Bichara Issa Djadallah confirmed Thursday that the army had driven the rebels back across the border with Sudan, whose President Omar al-Beshir has been accused by Deby and the president of the neighbouring Central African Republic, Francois Bozize, of backing insurgents.
“We used our right of pursuit up to five kilometres across the frontier. “After that, we withdrew back on to Chadian territory,” Djadallah told journalists in Adre.
“The mercenaries supported by Sudan are recruiting anew,” the minister added. “If they are sent back into Chad to destabilise it, we are ready to fight to push them back again.”
Of Tuesday's fighting, RAFD spokesman Yaya Dillo Djerou earlier said that “government forces first attacked the UFDD around Hadjer Marfain, then attacked our nearby positions.”
The government spokesman in N'Djamena, Communications Minister Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor, asserted on Wednesday that the rebels had been “totally annihilated” and also claimed that about 700 of their men had been killed.
But both rebel movements not only denied this on Thursday, but declared they were holding their positions. The UFDD said about 100 government soldiers had been killed and many wounded, while the RAFD said it had counted 487 enemy dead, for minimal losses in its own ranks.
Khartoum refutes allegations of backing cross-border insurgency and in turn accuses Chad and CAR of supporting rebels in Darfur.
